Community Corner

Her Husband's Illness Showed Her a New Path

Montville's Cecelia Sullivan practices an alternative form of medicine, called Healing Touch

Cecelia Sullivan came upon Healing Touch while she was trying to help her husband adjust to early-onset Alzheimer’s.

As the disease progressed, Joe became increasingly restless.  Discussions with his medical providers indicated medication as an aid. 

Cecelia heard about Healing Touch, a nonpharmacological technique that rebalances the body's energy. 

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If Joe had not been suffering from Alzheimer’s, Cecelia says, he’d have said he wanted “none of that voodoo stuff.”

Instead, he accepted it. He was on the therapy table, she says, and he was reluctantly going along with it. And as the therapist practiced, Cecelia says, “I literally witnessed his body relaxing.”

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Then and there, she realized “there is something to this.”

 

AFTER THE SESSION, the therapist gave Cecelia homework. She was to learn how to do the basic Healing Touch moves, so that she could help Joe at home.

She rose to meet the challenge.

She learned how to do the therapy, and she and Joe found that he would sleep better after the sessions, and she would sleep better, too.

In time, as Joe’s death neared, Cecelia wasn’t able to “hold the energy.”

Joe was in the VA hospital in Rocky Hill, and even though Cecelia didn’t have the skill to help him, two Healing Touch practitioners met her in Colchester, traveled with her to the hospital, and helped Joe relax.

 

HEALING TOUCH WAS STARTED in 1989 by a nurse named Janet Mentgen, according to the Healing Touch website. She is described as “an energetically sensitive nurse” who, over 43 years, had worked the Navy, in an emergency room, and in home health care. While it is constructed on a medical model, she says, it is not meant to take the place of traditional medicine, but is an alternative way to rebalance the body’s energy.

The Healing Touch website describes the program as “an energy therapy in which practitioners consciously use their hands in a heart-centered and intentional way to support and facilitate physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health.”

The practitioner might or might not actually touch the subject during a Healing Touch session. The noninvasive procedures focus on the aura and the chakras, Cecelia explains – the energy surrounding the body and the energy points within the body.  Healing Touch channels and uses the body’s own energy to help relieve pain and stress.

According to the Journal of Holistic Nursing, “Hands-on healing and energy-based interventions have been found in cultures throughout history around the world. These complementary therapies, rooted in ancient Eastern healing practices, are becoming mainstream.”

 

CECELIA’S HUSBAND DIED five years ago. This year, Cecelia became a certified Healing Touch practitioner. It took her 10 months to perform 100 treatments over 10 discipline areas. She worked primarily with people at Fairview Odd Fellows Home in Groton.

David Brown, director of development there, said that residents responded very well to the Healing Touch work.

“It’s very good for pain management,” he said, “and it’s something that the residents can work with on their own.”

He said there was some initial pushback from some of the staffers, but that they came around when they saw the effect it was having on the residents. Some of the staff even took advantage of a training session Fairview ran, and can work with the residents now.

Cecelia is hoping to focus her Healing Touch work on hospice care, but she is also interested in working with people who have a need and are willing to try this sort of energy work.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you may email her at c.sullivanhtp@yahoo.com; put "Healing Touch" in the subject line.


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